Energy giant BP is closing its European mega data centres and migrating all data and 900 key applications hosted there to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of a company-wide programme to accelerate the digitisation of its infrastructure and operations.
 
The two centres, the largest that BP operates globally, host data from across all BP’s businesses. Moving to AWS enables BP to use a broad portfolio of cloud services, including machine learning, analytics, storage, security, databases and compute to gain insights and automate processes.
 
The data centre migration expands upon BP’s existing relationship with AWS, which has helped the organisation improve operational efficiencies, eliminate upfront capital expenditures and quickly adapt to market changes.
 
In its global downstream business, BP’s refineries run Aveva Unified Supply Chain (previously Spiral Suite) software, a decision-making analytics platform, on AWS. By deploying Aveva Unified Supply Chain on AWS, a problem that with legacy options would have required seven hours of calculation time can now be performed in less than four minutes.
 
“We are pleased to expand our relationship with BP as the company moves its largest mega data centres, which host mission-critical data applications, to AWS,” said Bill Vass, vice president at AWS. “AWS is the world’s leading cloud, with an unmatched portfolio of cloud services, proven performance and operational expertise, which is why global companies like BP trust AWS to support their digital transformations.”
 
BP has also migrated approximately half of its 65 business critical SAP production environments to AWS, which has improved system performance and integrity.
 
The company now plans to accelerate the migration of additional SAP applications to AWS. In addition, BP is creating a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for use across its businesses, and will use Amazon Kinesis, a service that helps organisations easily collect, process and analyse real-time streaming data, to gain timely insights for its emissions monitoring and petrol station pump operations.
 
With this information and leveraging Amazon SageMaker, a machine learning (ML) service that provides the ability to build, train and deploy ML models quickly, BP will be able to make predictions that will help the energy company make faster business decisions and drive efficiencies.
 
Moving forwards, BP aims to continue to advance its cloud-first enterprise data strategy to improve its supply-chain operations and deliver the IoT for increased safety, predictive maintenance, corrosion detection, logistics tracking and intelligent assistance.
 
BP’s cloud-first IT approach is helping it simplify processes and enhance productivity as part of its strategy to advance the energy transition.
 
“We’ve been working with AWS for many years, and today’s announcements further strengthen that relationship,” said BP CIO Steve Fortune. “AWS is helping BP to transform our operations, and together we are using the cloud and renewable energy resources to drive energy efficiencies. Exiting our European data centres and migrating to AWS supports our digital transformation agenda, and we’re excited about the possibilities for increased flexibility, operational efficiencies and opportunities to innovate while helping to advance the energy transition.”
 
The companies also announced that AWS has signed two renewable energy projects with BP that will provide over 170MW wind and solar capacity in Sweden and Spain each year over the next decade to supply energy to Amazon’s fulfilment network in Europe and AWS data centres.
 
London headquartered BP delivers heat, light and mobility products and services to people all around the world. It operates in 78 countries and has around 73,000 employees.